patent policy

Dear W3C Members, please consider that introducing the new policy of paid
standards will be a very big problems for the open-source developers
community. The latter has been growing over the past years and now is
producing a huge amount of popular software, including Apache, Mozilla
but also thousands of other programs used by thousands of schools,
universities, companies and private persons.

Preventing them from accessing the future web definitions breaks the whole
idea of open standards and takes us back to the dark ages of competing
companies, developing their own incompatible proprietary protocols.

I recognize that the proposed policy may be very attractive for some of
the Consortium members, that would directly take benefit from reducing
strong competition introduced by the open source software. But please
remember that W3C was created to promote open standards, and openness
in this case means also availability to all interested parties.

-- 
Paweł Krawczyk *** home: <http://ceti.pl/~kravietz/>
security: <http://ipsec.pl/>  *** fidonet: 2:486/23

Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 15:01:36 UTC